BlueMoon Solutions

The answer, of course, is yes there are a number of different ways of gaining access to the services like BBC iPlayer when you are here in Spain. We heard about a whole raft of them (proxy servers etc) when our local English TV went through its “difficult period” just over a year ago. None of the services that I reviewed at the time were quite as good as the service that www.my-private-network.co.uk offer.

My Private Network is a UK company that offer VPN (virtual private network) connections to those of us that are outside the UK. A VPN provides an encrypted and secure connection between two points (in this case between your computer and the servers of My Private Network in the UK) and, in my opinion, provides a much more secure method of access than using a proxy server which provides no encryption whatsoever.

The upshot of all this is that if you setup a My Private Network connection on your computer, you will be able to access the “on demand” services offered in the UK.  In conjunction with The Jungle Drums, we have negotiated a free trial of My Private Network’s services so that you can try them out and see whether they work with your Internet connection.

This free trial will be available throughout the month of February, after which if you want to continue to use their service you will need to contact them direct to sign up.

If you decide to sign up to their service, it is only £5 a month.  In order to take advantage of this service, you will need a computer. It doesn’t matter whether its Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 or your mac (yes Alan, even you can use it!) and a broadband Internet connection. The setup is very straight forward (even our editor managed to do it himself without any help so believe me that means it MUST be simple!)

The instructions for setup are available from the providers website at www.my-private-network.co.uk Just click on the “getting started” button and then follow the instructions for your particular operating system. At this stage, if you want to use the trial account, you don’t need to click on the “sign up now” button as the trial account has already been set up and you should use the following information when creating your connection:

Username = BlueMoon Test Account

Password = bluemoon

Note that there is a space between each word on the username.  Of course, once you have setup your secure connection to the UK, you will need to go to the service that you are interested in using (e.g. BBC iPlayer), this can be found at www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer, if you visit this website before you have setup your connection you will notice that its not available to anyone outside the UK. but after you have your connection setup, you will not receive this message and you will be able to use the service just as if you were in the UK.

If you have any difficulties then don’t hesitate to contact us.